Bruised but still here

I was unemployed for almost 400 days.

Before I was laid off, if someone had told me they had been unemployed that long, I would have thought they were lying or doing something very wrong. Are you really applying to jobs? Are you bad at interviewing? Does your resume have a million typos? Are you applying for jobs you’re not qualified for?

I think that’s one of the reasons I told very few people I’d lost my job. It felt shocking and embarrassing every single time, plus it still didn’t feel real. Like something was wrong with me because no one would hire me. I did not have the mental bandwidth to manage my own life; explaining in detail to someone else why I was finding it impossible to find a new job was beyond my abilities.

When I was laid off, I took one week to sit with my shock and grief, then I started applying for jobs. I was given 12-weeks severance, and I wanted to find a new job before that time was up, so I could put all that extra money in my savings account. My plan was to come out ahead of this setback, start a new job and have a new paycheck before the severance ran out.

I had my first interview a few weeks later. I look good on paper and have lots of experience. This was going to be so easy!

Except the salary was less than I made my first year of teaching. The job wanted a college degree and 3-5 years writing experience but wanted to pay me for none of it. No, thank you.

I kept applying for jobs, getting some interviews and lots of rejection emails. By October, I was going through rounds of interviews at a Fortune 500 company. Things were going great. They wanted to pay me an insane amount of money. I’d have to travel to Columbus, Ohio, three days a week, but we could make it work. It was such a great opportunity.

In the third (fourth?) round, they ghosted me. Like just stopped all communication. We went from “we’ll get the offer drawn up and emailed over” to silence.

I learned the hard way you shouldn’t stop applying for jobs just because it looked like you were getting an offer soon. I had wasted a few weeks of not applying for jobs and was back at square one.

October turned into November and then December.

No one hires around the holidays, so I wasn’t confident I’d have much luck until 2024. But then in early December, I started interviewing at an online merchant to manage writers and editors. I went through three rounds of group interviews, each one more promising than the next. Things were looking good.

Then I got the “we’re going with another candidate” email the day after Christmas.

I’ve always thought I didn’t care much about what other people thought of me. In many cases, that still holds true. But this process was a mind fuck. How many times can I be rejected before I start to lose all sense of myself? Is there something wrong with me? All the ways my previous boss had told me I was horrible or overbearing, was that coming across in all these interviews? I had lots of first interviews, but I had many second and third interviews also. I tried to tell myself I wouldn’t be invited back if I was as off-putting as my old boss said.

But I wasn’t being offered a job either. So maybe she was correct.

I stretched my 12 weeks of severance to just over 20 weeks. Money was tight, but Chris was working any overtime he was offered, and our budget was saving us. I’ve written endlessly about money and how we manage it, but I can’t tell you how much having a budget made the first 5-ish months of my unemployment more manageable. I knew what we could cut immediately when I lost my paycheck. Being laid off was shocking, but I wasn’t, at first, worried about our finances. We intentionally live below our means, but trimming a lot of the fat (our new clothes budget, vacation fund, etc.) was a painless choice. Plus, it all felt temporary. I just knew I’d have a job soon.

January was coming and people would start hiring again.

By the end of January, I applied for unemployment benefits. My severance was gone. I was applying for jobs, but not getting any calls for interviews. We hadn’t touched our savings yet, but it felt like we were getting close to it. Through the fall, I had been doing odd jobs for family members and friends of friends. Need your laundry room redone? I got you. Need your house cleaned? I’m your woman. I was buying furniture and random stuff at auctions and selling it on Marketplace or Etsy. I was applying for jobs and doing so many random side hustles that our needs were being met, but by the new year, things were getting stressful. We weren’t saving any money, and I didn’t have any job prospects. Things couldn’t continue like this for much longer.

Unemployment finally kicked in, and it almost covered our mortgage payment. I got a freelance writing job in February that felt promising as I continued to look for a full-time job. We demo’d our upstairs bathroom thinking we could finally fix the leak that we’d discovered five months prior.

Except the leak had created much more damage than we thought. And the freelance job only lasted a few weeks before they decided I wasn’t a good fit (great! just what I needed to hear!). Now we had a destroyed bathroom and office, no additional income, and bills to pay.

Chris and I started donating plasma around this time. This felt like another humiliating blow. Chris was working as much as he could, and then after work he’d go spend hours waiting to donate then sitting in a chair while they took his plasma. I’d drop the girls off at school then go spend the morning at the clinic.

A random fact about me is that my veins are incredibly difficult to draw blood from. They’re deep and they roll and I have really low blood pressure; I’ve always been a hard stick. In college, I worked at a clinic where the nurses saw my veins as a fun challenge on slow days. I’m not scared of needles, but I’ve had some pretty painful experiences. More often than not, I’d show up to donate plasma, spend a few hours waiting and then just have the techs dig around in both arms until they had to give up. I’d come home covered in bruises and swollen. I’d wear long sleeves and wait for the bruises to go away, then do back and try again.

It was, in many ways, a violent way to make money. Chris could do it easily, but I could only donate when a certain woman was working. She was the only one who could stick me, no matter how confidently the other techs assured me they could. Mostly, I just wasted 3 hours to come home covered in deep, painful bruises and bandaids, with no extra money to show for it.

Chris pleaded with me to stop, but I felt so hopeless and guilty about not having a job that I felt like the punishment was appropriate. I needed to contribute to our family. I felt guilty he was working so much and then spending his evenings at the plasma donation center. He was tired and overworked, and I needed to be able to do something besides apply for jobs and do random work for other people who paid me more than I was worth because they felt sorry for me.

The bruises felt deserved.

I kept applying for jobs, mostly getting rejected, and going on a few interviews. I sometimes made it past the first round and sometimes I did not. I spent hours on LinkedIn and job websites. When I was initially laid off, I was given access to a job coach and job search firm. They helped me with interviewing and resumes and cover letters, but I exhausted their resources and contract before I found a job. The school year ended, and I still did not have a job. My daughters had completed their 7th and 9th grade school years, and I had been unemployed the whole time.

I was still in shock. It felt like I was living in a nightmare, where nothing made sense, and I couldn’t figure out how to wake up. And all of this was my fault. I spent hours rehashing my last job, convinced I could somehow fix everything if I thought about it long enough. And still, very few people knew I was unemployed. I was severely depressed, didn’t know how to ask for help, and didn’t know how to help myself.

I was applying for any and every job I was vaguely qualified for. I didn’t care if I had to drive an hour each way to an office job. I didn’t care if I would be paid half of what my last salary was. I kept thinking about the job interview I declined in September because of pay. How clueless I had been. I should have accepted anything and everything that came my way. I thought it would be easier than this.

In the summer, a former colleague and boss reached out. She had been checking on me since I had been laid off. She offered to connect me with a few people. I welcomed the connections. I introduced myself to both people and then applied for jobs at their places of employment putting their names down as referrals, with their permission. I had done this countless times in the past 11 months. LinkedIn is a hellscape, but it’s good for knowing who works where and how that might help you.

Within a week, one of the companies reached out. The recruiter loved me. She ended our longer-than-scheduled call with “we’re going to get you a job here.” I was past hopeful or trusting of recruiters. I had literally been told I had a job before and then ghosted. But, okay, whatever you say, lady.

By this time, I had run out of unemployment benefits. We were paying our mortgage with our savings, which I had avoided for as long as I could. I was sure I’d have to go find a retail job, I was out of options. I was still busting my ass buying and selling stuff on the internet and doing any and every odd job someone offered me, but it had been a year without a job, and we couldn’t keep doing what we were doing much longer. Would I have to ask one of my parents for money? I knew either one of them would help if I asked, but I felt so defeated already. I think that would have been a tipping point for me. But it was soon going to be the only option.

But the recruiter had been right. She was going to get me a job there. After rounds of interviews, a job offer finally arrived. A good job offer. One that I accepted, trying not to sound as desperate as I was. I began the new job after being unemployed for over a year. It still felt unreal, that someone had thought I’d be a good fit somewhere after being told I wasn’t for so long.

I had applied to over 800 jobs while I was unemployed. Had countless recruiter phone calls. Went on endless first interviews and many second and third interviews. Sometimes I heard back after interviews and sometimes I did not. I told myself I was just bad at interviewing, but I got enough callbacks I knew that wasn’t true. I read countless posts and threads from people in similar situations. Unemployment was low but finding a job if you were unemployed was insanely hard. My messy search for a job wasn’t unique. Lots of people were working just as hard as I was with no success.

I’m not exactly sure why I’m sharing this now, besides the internet has always been a place I’ve shared hard things. I don’t do that as often as I used to, but this one felt like it deserved space. Because I know reading this when I was unemployed would have made me feel less alone. Because I’ve mentioned my depression but not fully explained it. Because I want to write about other things now, but this experience has had such a profound influence on my life I felt I couldn’t go forward without telling it. Because I’m a different person now, and I want to mark it in some way.

I thought I’d share about this experience after I started my new job. But then I got worried. What if that’s too soon? What if this new job doesn’t work out? So I decided to wait until my 3-month review. After I pass the trial period, then I’ll share. But then that passed, and I thought I’d share a little bit later.

My review went well and my boss is helpful, communicative, and encouraging. I feel stable and welcome in this role, but the lasting impact of a horrible boss and a layoff has followed me to this new place. I’ve had this job for 5 months, and I still live in fear of losing it. Even when no signs point in that direction. I finished out the year with a review that was really good and planning with my supervisor what I want to work on when this project is finished. My boss sees me in this position long term. I’m still just working to make myself believe it too.

I want to leave most of this in 2024. I want to get it out of the way. I want to start 2025 with less fear and shame. I lost my job in 2023, and it took me a really long time to find a new one. Its impact was felt in a million ways. We have picked up a lot of those pieces in the past five months, but not as quickly as I would like. Even after all these years and all kinds of lessons to the contrary, I still want to be more resilient and quick-healing than I can be. Than I should be.

Thanks for reading and thanks for all the messages. It’s the first day of 2025, and I’m looking forward to a better year than the past two. Not because I have a job now, but because we survived, because we’re still here despite all the hard stuff. And that’s a constant in my life I’ve come to appreciate.

Still here.

Thanks be to God.